merely said what he wanted himself, it is quite possible this book would
not have been written. Even if Mr. Shaw, without saying what he wanted,
had ever shown in any corner of any book that one man's wanting
something in this world amounted to anything, or could make any one else
want it, or could make any difference in him, or in the world around
him, perhaps I would not have written this book.

Everywhere, as I have looked about me among the bookmen in America, in
England, I have found, not the things that they wanted in their books,
but always these same deadly lists or bleak inventories--these prairies
of things that they did not want.

Now, as a matter of fact, I knew already, with an almost despairing
distinctness, nearly all these things I did not want and it has not
helped me (with all due courtesy and admiration) having John Galsworthy
out photographing them day after day, so that I merely did not want them
harder. And Mr. Wells's measles and children's diseases, too. I knew
already that I did not want them. And Mr. Shaw's entire, heroic, almost
noble collection of things he does not want does not supply me--nor
could it supply any other man with furniture to make a world with--even
if it were not this real, big world, with rain and sunshine and wind and
people in it, and were only that little, wonderful world a man lives
within his own heart. There have been times, and there will be more of
them, when I could not otherwise than speak as the champion of Bernard
Shaw; but, after all, what single piece of furniture is there that
George Bernard Shaw, living with his great attic of not-things all
around him, is able to offer to furnish me for me single, little, warm,
lighted room to keep my thoughts in? Nor has he furnished me with one
thing with which I would care to sit down in my little room and
think--looking into the cold, perfect hygienic ashes he has left upon my